Matthews Top of the Hill, Daly City

The 1970s and 1980s really weren’t all that great. It was difficult to find decent Thai food, TiVo wasn’t invented yet and you couldn’t turn on Top 40 radio without hearing music like this. But at least you could go to your local electronics store knowing that if you bought a television or car stereo, you would also walk out the door with a new 15-speed bicycle.

Del Vigil sent me a link to this Matthews TV and Stereo City commercial (“6400 Mission Street, Top of the Hill, Daly City!”) when he was working on a Sunday Pink section story on bikes. These commercials — with the peppy synthesizer music and the promise of an assembled “touring bike” with every purchase — were eclipsed in their ubiquitousness on Bay Area television only by Paul from the Diamond Center.

I went to Matthews just once, some time in the late 1980s, when I was looking to put a new car stereo in the Love Demon. I was mostly stunned at how small the place was — it was maybe one-sixth the size of your typical Best Buy, with merchandise stacked in huge piles. Having no need for another Kermit the Frog-style bike, I left without a purchase and went to Circuit City.

A lot of other people must have been doing the same thing, because Matthews went out of business in the early 1990s. It became a Western Christian Book Store for a while, and is currently a One Dollar Only store, according to Yelp.